CHAPTER IV

TIME AND ATTENTION

NATURALLY it is possible to make a rough estimate only of the amount
of attention people give each day to informing themselves about public
affairs. Yet it is interesting that three estimates that I have
examined agree tolerably well, though they were made at different
times, in different places, and by different methods.1

A questionnaire was sent by Hotchkiss and Franken to 1761 men and
women college students in New York City, and answers came from all but
a few. Scott used a questionnaire on four thousand prominent business
and professional men in Chicago and received replies from twenty-three
hundred. Between seventy and seventy-five percent of all those who
replied to either inquiry thought they spent a quarter of an hour a
day reading newspapers. Only four percent of the Chicago group guessed
at less than this and twenty-five percent guessed at more. Among the
New Yorkers a little over eight percent figured their newspaper
reading at less than fifteen minutes, and seventeen and a half at
more.

Very few people have an accurate idea of fifteen minutes, so the
figures are not to be taken literally. Moreover, business men,
professional people, and college students are most of them liable to a
curious little bias against appearing to spend too much time over the
newspapers, and perhaps also to a faint suspicion of a desire to be
known as rapid readers. All that the figures can justly be taken to
mean is that over three quarters of those in the selected groups rate
rather low the attention they give to printed news of the outer world.

These time estimates are fairly well confirmed by a test which is less
subjective. Scott asked his Chicagoans how many papers they read each
day, and was told that

14

percent

read but one paper

46

"

" two papers

21

"

" three papers

10

"

" four papers

3

"

" five papers

2

"

" six papers

3

"

" all the papers (eight at the time of this inquiry).

The two- and three-paper readers are sixty-seven percent, which comes
fairly close to the seventy-one percent in Scott's group who rate
themselves at fifteen minutes a day. The omnivorous readers of from
four to eight papers coincide roughly with the twenty-five percent who
rated themselves at more than fifteen minutes.

It is still more difficult to guess how the time is distributed. The
college students were asked to name "the five features which interest
you most." Just under twenty percent voted for "general news," just
under fifteen for editorials, just under twelve for "politics," a
little over eight for finance, not two years after the armistice a
little over six for foreign news, three and a half for local, nearly
three for business, and a quarter of one percent for news about
"labor." A scattering said they were most interested in sports,
special articles, the theatre, advertisements, cartoons, book reviews,
"accuracy," music, "ethical tone," society, brevity, art, stories,
shipping, school news, "current news," print. Disregarding these,
about sixty-seven and a half percent picked as the most interesting
features news and opinion that dealt with public affairs.

This was a mixed college group. The girls professed greater interest
than the boys in general news, foreign news, local news, politics,
editorials, the theatre, music, art, stories, cartoons,
advertisements, and "ethical tone." The boys on the other hand were
more absorbed in finance, sports, business page, "accuracy" and
"brevity." These discriminations correspond a little too closely with
the ideals of what is cultured and moral, manly and decisive, not to
make one suspect the utter objectivity of the replies.

Yet they agree fairly well with the replies of Scott's Chicago
business and professional men. They were asked, not what features
interested them most, but why they preferred one newspaper to another.
Nearly seventy-one percent based their conscious preference on local
news (17.8%), or political (15.8%) or financial (11.3%), or foreign
(9.5%), or general (7.2%), or editorials (9%). The other thirty
percent decided on grounds not connected with public affairs. They
ranged from not quite seven who decided for ethical tone, down to one
twentieth of one percent who cared most about humor.

How do these preferences correspond with the space given by newspapers
to various subjects? Unfortunately there are no data collected on this
point for the newspapers read by the Chicago and New York groups at
the time the questionnaires were made. But there is an interesting
analysis made over twenty years ago by Wilcox. He studied one hundred
and ten newspapers in fourteen large cities, and classified the
subject matter of over nine thousand columns.

Averaged for the whole country the various newspaper matter was found
to fill: